Tribunal: Forstater’s stand for women’s rights was free speech – The Militant

....At Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland, law student Lisa Keogh faced an investigation from the college’s disciplinary board after she said during an online class that women are born with vaginas and “the difference in physical strength of men versus women is a fact.” Keogh said men who identify as women shouldn’t compete against women in martial arts. It took the university administration two months to determine that she had not harassed or discriminated against anyone. Keogh won backing from the Free Speech Union of which she is a member.

“It was a modern-day witch hunt,” Keogh told the press when she was cleared. “No woman should face discrimination in the way I have because she believes in sex-based rights.”

“When I worked in a garage, men would help me because I wasn’t physically as able as them,” Keogh told online magazine Spiked. “I have equal rights to them and to men in general, but I cannot be a man.”

Accepting the reality of biological difference between sexes is a precondition to advancing working-class solidarity against bosses who seek to pit men against women.

The opposite class view is widely promoted by companies and state bodies that sign on to the “Diversity Champions” program put forward by the British group Stonewall. The list includes the Scottish government. Some 500 organizations fork out the 2,500 pounds ($3,500) annual membership fee to be graded by the group for their “diversity.” Measures used to determine this include whether companies lobby for legal changes to let people “self-identify” their sex.

Anti-scientific notions that “men” and “women” are merely subjective categories to be changed at will are frontal assaults on conquests won by the movement for women’s rights.

“Women and girls lose out on privacy, safety and fairness if males are allowed into changing rooms, dormitories, prisons, sports teams,” Forstater has pointed out.

In a related matter, a man who says he is now a woman has been admitted to compete on a woman’s team at the Olympics for the first time. Despite the obvious advantages of having gone through puberty with male testosterone levels, 43-year-old Laurel Hubbard will be competing against women in weightlifting for New Zealand this summer. Hubbard did not make the grade as a senior international competitor until announcing he was transitioning to become a woman, at the age of 35.

This is a blow to women’s sports, which depend on separate competitions for men and women, and a blow to hard-fought gains for women’s rights.

Tribunal: Forstater’s stand for women’s rights was free speech – The Militant